UTC Website Projects

and CMS migration

But Where Is ‘There?’

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I used to console one of my teams by saying “Don’t worry, we’ll get there.” It seemed like a cliché statement but usually conveyed the upbeat optimism often needed by a project manager. While I recognized there were obstacles and challenges, it always seemed like a natural way to keep up everyone’s spirits in the face of tasks that continued to pile on.

Until one day after saying this phrase, one of my team members said, “But where is ‘there?’” He was a bit of a philosopher, so we all had a good laugh at the existential question.

Getting there is the goal. Getting there can also be the journey. Getting all the website content migrated is a “there” in my mind. With over 6,000 webpages, “there” can seem like a distant star.

Getting “there” one page at a time.

The migration of content from OU Campus to Drupal is in full swing.  The Web team of Developers and Student Workers have begun the task of moving content over. The first groups to be affected by the migration are the

  • Office of Communications and Marketing
  • Office of the Chancellor
  • Office of Information Technology
  • Division of Finance and Administration (all departments).

In order to maintain a synchronized migration, editors in OU Campus will be temporarily locked out of the sites they maintain.  This is similar to the process we used during the website refresh last year.  While the sites are locked down, any changes should be submitted via the Web Request portal.

As work begins for each group, we are notifying the department heads to let them know the process for changes and an approximate timeline while pages are migrated.  Depending on the number of web pages for each group, the timeline will vary.

Before we can go live in Drupal with the new pages, we have to have enough moved over due to the number of linked pages across the entire site.

So what is being migrated? Current content. At this time, we are reviewing content and moving everything that is dated 2019-2020 fiscal and academic years.

Archives, minutes from meetings in calendar years older than 2019, conference websites from the past and anything with a date older than 2018 are not being moved at this time. This doesn’t mean these pages may not be moved in the future, but we are focusing on the timely, up-to-date information needed by students, recruits, employees and external audiences.

Section Editors will receive training in the new system on an ongoing schedule as the migration occurs.

We are determining rounds based on resources to move content and editor availability. The next round of migration will cover these areas:

  • Library
  • Research
  • SimCenter
  • Graduate School
  • Office of Development and Alumni Affairs.

Round three will consist of

  • Academic Affairs
  • OPEIR
  • Walker Center for Teaching and Learning
  • Faculty Senate
  • General Education
  • Center for Professional Education.

All other departments and offices to follow will be announced as we finalize Rounds 1 through 3 above. To maintain our aggressive pace, we need to move 1,000 pages a month for the next six months or 250 pages a week. We have all hands-on deck for this effort.

And when all is said and done, we anticipate we will be “there” by August 1.

Building a Website One Block at a Time

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Santa was very good to me.  I received the Guggenheim Museum and the Women of NASA LEGO sets. So many little tiny pieces! However, the journey to completion will provide the most fun and probably some frustration.

Construction takes planning. The Women of NASA set has 231 pieces and the Guggenheim has 744 pieces and a 40-page guide! The first task is to sort the pieces by color and then by shape. Everything from that point starts with assembling the base and working my way up.

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And That’s a Wrap

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It finally happened. The website refresh, Phase 1 of a multi-year deep look into the UTC website, has officially closed out as a project. The refresh began in October 2018.

We chose a ‘refresh’ over ‘redesign’ as we wanted to address the following goals:

  • Accessibility of the entire site.
  • Elimination of old, outdated content and pages (also to reduce page count).
  • Responsive design regardless of audience viewing on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
  • Establish more consistency across the entire site to improve user experience.
  • Focus attention on the external audiences of the site, specifically attracting and retaining students.

[Read more…]

The Shortest Pencil Beats the Longest Memory

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My husband is a woodworker. He reads, plans, makes notes, makes more notes, draws pictures, creates mock-ups from cardboard, practices his ideas on leftovers, figures out the cost of materials, scouts various hardware stores, and eventually he starts the actual building of a project. I frequently tell him he has all the hallmarks of a great project manager, although his projects seldom complete on the schedule I provide!

So this weekend, in his new issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine, he points out an article on “Trading in your hammer for a clipboard.” My personal and professional life collided.

I don’t have a good analogy for the hammer, but I can say that many of those tasks listed above have happened in various forms to bring the Web Refresh project team to this point.

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Infrastructure of UTC’s Drupal 8 Project

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Building and maintaining a content management system for a high-traffic, public website is very challenging. Developers need to have a rational, safe and well-documented system for getting code from their local computer, into a testing environment, and then deployed to a production web server. For the UTC CMS Migration project, we have chosen a system built with technology supplied by Acquia, a software-as-a-service company that provides enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal.

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And Then There Were 10

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Do you remember that feeling you had when you were on your way to your first day of school? A mix of excitement, anticipation, maybe a little fear and trepidation for the work that is to come? First days can be filled equally with mixed emotions for new employees.

Well, on the web team we have grown exponentially in the last year. First, Mike Flores joined Chris Gilligan in January and they have anchored our development work this year. And, on August 15, we increased the development team by one third. Bernardo Martinez is our newest web programmer and now part of the UTC web triumvirate.

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Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

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The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Be Our Guest

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If you’ve been to anything Disney, you know there’s an entire culture around visitors being treated as guests.  If you’ve shopped at Nordstrom’s or Williams-Sonoma, both hallmarks of customer service, the focus on understanding customers and making spaces inviting is paramount to what they do.  You don’t just buy a product, you have an overall experience.

With that thought in mind, the Web team is implementing a more robust way to collect your issues and requests.

[Read more…]

A Letter from Camp

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UTC was a Bronze sponsor of Drupal Camp Chattanooga held on June 7-8 at Chattanooga State Community College.  Chèrie Whipple, Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores attended to represent UTC.

This is my third Drupal specific camp having attended Baltimore’s Drupal Camp and Washington D.C.’s DrupalGovCon. The Chattanooga Drupal Users Group (CHADUG), headed up by Lee Walker of Code Journeyman, meets monthly. Meeting other Drupal users and hearing their stories, particularly how Drupal changed their career lives, has been eye opening and encouraging. [Read more…]